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Thread: Attitude indicator...
1. Just because you are in space and in vacuum does not mean you are going to continue to accelerate. There are lots of things in space that can cause you to decelerate, namely the gravity well of a planet, or the atmosphere of a planet. The Speed Limit as it were is would correspond to the maximum amount of thrust the engine can produce, not the top speed (besides, if you accelerated indefinately in relativistic space, you would get squished into chunky salsa by the G-forces. (hyperspace doesnt count because at that point you have basically entered a different kind of space temporarily, also you arent technically moving any faster than you were in real space)
2. Attitude indicator would be awsome. As far as the radar display, if anyone remembers the old game Elite or Elite II Frontier, it had a great 3D radar, and had a rotating attitude indicator built in. ALSO, the blips would have lines going up or down depending on how far up or down they were from your horizon, so there wasnt a question of arey the above me or below me.
Perhaps i understand this wrong, but the attitude indicator in a plane displays your position in correlation to the horizon. Due to this i dare to ask, what would it refer to in space?
There is no horizon, there is no flat ground above which you fly, either. The only thing which would come to mind would be that you'd put an imaginary zero-height plain into each solar system. This plain would be the "normal" area where the planets rotate upon. (Within some tolerance, this would at least work in our solar system.) Anyways, i would vote against that... a minor reason is that already in our system, some planets are rather tumbline around that plains, only passing it in long time intervals, the real reason is that it would reduce the 3D space feeling if there would be something like that.
On the radar thing i fully agree, though. The current radar is useable, it's close to the system wich was introduced with Wing Commander and was found in many simimar games later on. Compared to the Elite-style radar it has the advantage that it can display it's information well enough while only using a small part of the screen.
The Elite-Style radar requires much more space on the screen so it can be read and used in a decent manner, but the additional info gained from that kind of radar more than offsets the price, making it a very good choice. So while some players probably would have the Elite-Style radar as it would clog their screen, i assume that most pilots would love to have it. The best thing would be to have it available in the options, so anybody who likes it can switch it on. (I would surely do so.)
Message Edited by Sylow on 01-13-2005 01:38 PM